Seth Weintraub over at 9to5Mac ordered up a basic, super-cheap 4k display from Seiki, and put it through it’s paces. He says he got what he paid for: $373.

He said it was fine for viewing 1080p television content.

But it left much to be desired as a monitor tethered to his 2013 Macbook Pro with Intel’s Iris Technology. Specifically, he ran it at a resolution of 3840-by-2160 at 30 Hz over its HDMI port. As the HDMI ports on the MBP and Seiki monitor are the HDMI 1.4 spec, they are limited to sending the signal at a paltry 30Hz. Says Weintraub about the 30Hz refresh rate:

[box style=’info’] I’ll say right here that this was almost a dealbreaker for me. 30Hz is unusable for gaming and pretty not fantastic for website scrolling and other stuff I do on a daily basis (not that you’ll need to do much scrolling on a huge 4K display) [/box]

However:

[box style=’info’] 4K Youtube videos played in Safari look great and are easily watchable. I downloaded an upconverted 4K movie and it looked as good as any display I’ve ever seen. [/box]

He sums up by saying it’s fine for the money, and he’ll use it as a second monitor, but the MBP and HDMI 1.4 aren’t ready for primetime-yet.